English Course Descriptions

English 211
- Introduction to Poetry and Poetics

Full course for one semester. This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental elements of a poem, such as rhythm, diction, imagery, metaphor, tone, form, speaker, and audience. We will read texts from a wide historical range and consider the historical development of selected forms and techniques. The course will also examine what some poets and critics have regarded as the nature and function of poetry and what bearing such theories have on the practice of poetry and vice versa. The course will emphasize close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

Studies in Nonfiction Prose

English 303
- American Studies Seminar: The Death of Satan

Full course for one semester. Early Americans viewed their history as an epic struggle against Satan; yet today, Americans’ sense of evil is weaker and more uncertain. How and why did Americans lose their sense of evil? This course offers an introduction to the methods of American Studies: we will look at literature in the context of American history and material culture. We will cover major American authors from the colonial period through postmodernism, including works by Rowlandson, Mather, Brockden Brown, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Wharton, James, Lowell, and Morrison. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above, at least one course in either American history or American religion, or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

English 311
- Studies in Non-Fiction Prose

AutobiographyFull course for one semester. This course will focus on a number of autobiographical texts from the late eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, tracing changing notions of self-representation and evolving conventions of the genre. The course begins with autobiographies where the self appears to have a clear, destined trajectory to worldly success and accomplishment, and the “story” is one of overcoming obstacles to a self-fulfilling design. But the narration of autobiographical writing inevitably interrupts such confidence, and we will track the discursive ways even seemingly self-confident writers complicate their stories. By the mid-to-late 20th century, life-writers experiment with diverse forms, challenging orthodox theories of memory, undermining conventional notions of truth and fiction, and emphasizing the ways in which identity is inseparable from performativity. Texts will be chosen from among: Gibbon’s Autobiography, Rousseau’s Confessions, Mill’s Autobiography, De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sartre’s The Words, Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood, Georges Perec’s W and Fraser’s In Search of a Past, Michel Leiris’ Manhood, and Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude. There will also be readings in autobiographical theory. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

The English Enlightenment and the Modern IntellectualFull course for one semester. In this course we will read a variety of major eighteenth-century authors whose work opens the modern debate on what it means to be a literary intellectual. Major authors will include Joseph Addison, David Hume, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft, with some contemporary contributions from writers including Susan Sontag. We will also read critical work attempting to define what enlightenment means, from Immanuel Kant, Horkheimer and Adorno, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

Studies in British Culture

English 337
- Studies in British Culture

British Literature, Colonialism, and Slavery, 1680-1830Full course for one semester. In this class we will read a series of texts that focus on the nature of national and imperial identity in an age of exploration, conquest and colonization. Most of the works are British, along with some French, American and Caribbean texts, and range from canonical texts by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Jane Austen to journals, letters, autobiographies and poetry by less well-known authors from the social periphery or margins of empire. Through these readings we will explore two kinds of questions: first, in close readings of the varied forms of these texts (satire, fiction, the memoir and journal, and poetry) we will trace the impact of various literary genres on political arguments and vice versa. Second, we will investigate what national identity is, what it means to be an imperial power, and what the nature of the non-European "other" is in a literary culture fascinated by the possibilities of colonial domination and confronted with the fact of slavery. Associated topics such as the development of a culture of ethnographic and cultural tourism in this period will also be examined. There will also be substantial secondary reading in recent criticism and theory on the questions raised by the readings.

The Bloomsbury GroupThis course examines the works and cultural impact of the Bloomsbury set, one of the most important of all English cultural movements and one that had an enormous impact on British cultural and social thought in the first half of the twentieth century. The course will stress the group's debt to the philosophies of G. E. Moore that emphasized the pleasures of human friendship and aesthetic appreciation, as well as its rejection of the restrictions of Victorian society. Primary attention will be given to the writings of Virginia Woolf, the pre-eminent figure of the group, but we will also look at the fiction of E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf; the criticism of Clive Bell and John Maynard Keynes; the art of Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant; and the biographical writings of Lytton Strachey. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Studies in Fiction

English 333
- Studies in Fiction

Postmodern CultureFull course for one semester. This course will introduce the field of postmodern studies—in connection with cultural studies and post-structuralism—and a number of issues associated with postmodernity and postmodernism in their cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions. While the focus is on fiction and theory, we will also examine films and television programs. Prominent among the topics this course covers are globalization, mass culture, terrorism, virtual reality, hypertext, conspiracy, hybridity, pastiche, “the death of the author / subject,” intertextuality, and nostalgia. We will read fiction by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Jean Rhys, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, and J. G. Ballard along with selected theoretical writings of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Slavoj Zizek. We will also screen several films, including films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Ridley Scott. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

The Modern NovelFull course for one semester. The focus of this course is a study of seminal modernist fictional texts. We will read novels by James, Conrad, Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, Woolf, and Beckett. We will examine such modernist strategies as the use of nonlinear time, stream of consciousness, self-fragmentation, and disjunctive narrators. Included will be discussion of the relation of aesthetic programs to the employment or obliteration of history, and we will read a number of theoretical interventions into the discourse of literary modernism. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.Edwardian Fictions: British Modernism until World War IFull course for one semester. This course will examine selected fictions of Edwardian England (1901–10), the decade that marked the transition to modernism in British fiction. We will read novels of the period such as Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay, and E. M. Forster’s Howards End by relating them to the contexts of modern British psychology, feminism, Fabian socialism, industrialism, aesthetic decadence, and the pervasive cultures of advertising and journalism. Additionally, our consideration of these novels will be framed by the closely related historical contexts of late Victorian society and World War I. In tracing both late Victorian anticipations of Edwardian cultural trends and the subsequent legacy of the Edwardians, we will read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then, in the final phase of the course, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (along with shorter works by Lawrence). Other writers may include William Morris, Thomas Hardy, and Lytton Strachey. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

The Social World of the Victorian NovelFull course for one semester. The Industrial Revolution, the entrenchment of the bourgeoisie, and the two Reform Bills made possible tremendous transformations in the social worlds of Victorian Great Britain. This course will examine how these changes were both documented and reimagined in the novels of several writers of the High Victorian period, including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope. We pay particular attention to the ways these novelists figure communities around the workplace, the home, the beau monde, the church, the law, and the state. There will be substantial historical, critical, and theoretical readings in addition to the novels. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

Desire, Sexuality, and the Twentieth-Century British NovelFull course for one semester. This course will examine the British novel’s preoccupation with the expression of human desire during the last century, when the discourses surrounding sex and sexuality greatly altered. We will study both sexuality and desire as they are formulated within the modern and contemporary British novel, in works by such authors as E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence Durrell, Iris Murdoch, J. R. Ackerley, Angela Carter, and Sarah Waters. There will be substantial theoretical, historical, and critical readings. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or permission of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

Description and NarrationFull course for one semester. This course will focus on the relations between description and narration in examples drawn from American, French, and English fiction. In what ways does description serve various narrative drives? In what ways does description assert its separate purposes and what might those be? Primary texts include Callistratus’s Descriptions, Chretien de Troyes’s Yvain, Melville’s Typee, Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, Woolf’s The Waves, Stein’s Three Lives, and Joyce’s Dubliners. Theoretical readings will be drawn from the work of M. M. Bakhtin, Michel Riffaterre, Roland Barthes, Elaine Scarry, W. T. J. Mitchell, and Paul Ricoeur. Weekly writing assignments and active participation are required. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference.

The Romance Full course for one semester. In this course we will interrogate the problematic status of the fictional narratives generally classified as romances. Is the romance a historically specific genre, the medieval precursor to the modern novel? Or is it, as Northrop Frye maintains, "the structural core of all fiction"? In thinking through such questions, we will also consider the relationship of the romance to the categories/genres of epic, novel, and history in light of critical discussions by Jameson, Auerbach, Parker, and others. As we move from the Greek romance through the "classic" romances of the Middle Ages and finally on to modern continuations of the form, we will specifically address issues of narrative structure, chivalric vs. heroic identities, and the historical representations of class, gender, and the nation. Texts studied may include Daphnis and Chloe, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, Behn's Oroonoko, Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, and Morris's The Wood Beyond the World. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference.

English 334
- Studies in Fiction

George Eliot and Charles Dickens Full course for one semester. This course will be devoted to a comparative examination of two major novelists from the Victorian period. We will consider distinct visions of society: Eliot’s representation of the provincial community and Dickens’s representation of London and urban experience. At the center of this course will be our close readings of Eliot’s Middlemarch and Dickens’s Bleak House. Other novels may include Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, and Dickens’s Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend. Throughout the semester we will review and evaluate influential contributions to the criticism on Eliot and Dickens. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

James Joyce and Virginia WoolfFull course for one semester. This course will examine the works of the two most influential figures associated with the modernist British and Irish novel. Both writers’ contributions to the contemporary critical understandings of modernism, consciousness, narrative form, gender, sexuality, and history will be stressed. Major works to be studied may include Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, The Voyage Out, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves, and Between the Acts. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

Studies in American Literature

English 341
- Studies in American Literature

Frontier LiteratureFull course for one semester. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared that “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” He also declared that the frontier was closed. In this course we will investigate the ways nineteenth-century American writers used the frontier to formulate notions of America, Americans, and American manhood. How did the myth of the frontier evolve as it traced the movements of explorers, sailors, gold miners, and cowboys? What role did women and the dispossessed play in this romance? We will cover both classical representations of the frontier by Lewis and Clark, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Louise Clappe, Caroline Kirkland, and Owen Wister, as well as views from the dispossessed by Black Hawk, John Rollin Ridge, and Deadwood Dick. We will address the frontier’s legacy in American popular and literary culture in the 20th century. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or higher, or sophomore standing and any course in American history, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

Native LiteraciesFull course for one semester. How did Native Americans understand the early American contact period and in what forms did they record their views? How do pre-contact Native traditions influence early post-contact texts? This course compares the alternative literacies of the Culhua Mexica (Aztec) of Mesoamerica and the Algonquians of Colonial New England. We will examine a variety of communicative and textual traditions ranging from letters, histories, autobiographies, poems, wills, and conversion narratives to pictographic works and material culture. This course fulfills the “before 1700” requirement for English majors. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or higher, or any one of the following: Anthropology 348, Anthropology 372, History 359, History 386, or Spanish 353, or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

Shepard and WilsonFull course for one semester. This course will be an in-depth study of the major works of two of the most significant American playwrights of the late twentieth century, Sam Shepard and August Wilson. Each will be studied in the context of the times in which he was writing. Shepard’s works include Buried Child, True West, and The Curse of the Starving Class. Wilson’s works will include Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences, and The Piano Lesson. Prerequisites: Humanities 110 and two 200-level English courses. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

The Borderlands as Imaginary Narrative SpaceFull course for one semester. This course will introduce the discourse of "the border" (the U.S.-Mexico border) using film, literature, and some secondary literature (theory/criticism). Film texts may include El Norte, El Mariachi, Touch of Evil, Lone Star, Men with Guns, La Bamba, Giant, Lourdes Portillo's documentary work, The Searchers, The Ox-Bow Incident, Spanglish, Born in East L.A., Traffic, and Maria Full of Grace. Literature may include Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera, Americo Paredes's George Washington Gomez and/or The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory, Luis Valdez' s Zoot Suit, and works by Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Cherrie Moraga. Prerequisites: two 200-level English courses or consent of instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

Jewish American LiteratureFull course for one semester. What is "Jewish" and what is "American" about Jewish-American literature? This course will introduce students primarily to Jewish-American fiction, with some attention to drama, autobiography, and poetry from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. We will discuss themes such as identity (cultural, ethnic, and religious), exile, gender, history and the Shoah (Holocaust), and issues such as humor, choice of language, and the relationship of Jewish American literature to other minority discourses and to other Jewish literatures. Texts may include work by Anzia Yezierska, Abraham Cahan, Jo Sinclair, Philip Roth, Joanne Greenberg, Chaim Potok, Cynthia Ozick, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Rebecca Goldstein, Melvin Bukiet, Allegra Goodman; David Mamet; Emma Lazarus, Alicia Ostriker, and Robert Pinsky; we will also view and discuss one or more films. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above.

Film NoirFull course for one semester. As the U.S. moved in the 1940s from a war-time experience to a new, postwar context, works of popular culture expressed both the hopes and fears that came with that transition. For example, a series of postwar films such as the well-known It's a Wonderful Life used magic figures who descended to earth to help lost and bedraggled protagonists find their way again in the confusions of the moment. But the way in which George Bailey's American dream so quickly can become a nightmare suggests an underside to 1940s optimism. In this respect, film noir, a trend of films that started during the war but really exploded in the postwar moment, expresses a bleaker, more bitter and downbeat vision of the historical moment. Here, heroes turn into confused loners caught in the labyrinths and dead ends of the city. Noir expresses tensions around urban life, around sexual roles and identity, around work and success, and so on. This course will examine noir both thematically and stylistically to pinpoint its expressive commentary on social trends and tensions. The course will also attend to the ongoing fascination with--and frequent revival of--noir style and subject-matter to study how the social concerns of film noir continue to express complications in the success story of America as a nation. The course will include both films and novels adapted to film or with a distinctly noir aesthetic, including Therese Raquin, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Blank Wall, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Previous coursework in film studies recommended. Conference.

Albee and KennedyFull course for one semester. This course will be an in-depth study of the works of two major avant garde American playwrights who first gained recognition in the 1960s, Edward Albee and Adrienne Kennedy. Albee's works include The Zoo Story, The American Dream, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Tiny Alice, and Three Tall Women. Kennedy's work includes Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers, A Rat's Mass, and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference.

English 356
- Studies in African-American Literature

The Black Radical Tradition Full course for one semester. Throughout the history of Black people as a colonized people in the West, there has been an ongoing debate about the proper relationship or stance the colonized should have toward the colonizer. In the nineteenth century, Martin Delany's radicalism was opposed by Frederick Douglass's more accommodationist stance. Later, the conflict was manifested by the contrast between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and then between Marcus Garvey and Du Bois. Later still, there were Malcolm X and Dr. King, and then Amiri Baraka and Ralph Ellison. With the possible exception of the DuBois-Washington conflict, the less radical position is the one that has received the most attention, both public and scholarly. This course will examine the work of three representative figures of the Black radical tradition in the twentieth century: W.E.B. DuBois (USA), C.L.R. James (Trinidad), and Richard Wright (USA). In particular, we will examine their relationship to Marxism as a means to the solution of the problem of the colonized. This course will be both interdisciplinary—we will read works of literature, history, and socio-cultural criticism—and cross cultural. Texts will include Black Reconstruction, The Souls of Black Folk (DuBois), The Black Jacobins, Beyond a Boundary (James), Native Son, and 12 Million Black Voices (Wright). Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

James Baldwin Full course for one semester. Baldwin has written that “Truth is a two-edged sword—and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud.” In the 1950s and 1960s, Baldwin was one of the primary truth tellers about race and American society. He not only wrote about it, but publicly acted on his beliefs. We will be reading all of Baldwin’s major fiction and essays, including Go Tell it on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni’s Room, Nobody Knows My Name, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, Going to Meet the Man, and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. Students should read on their own Richard Wright’s Native Son. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Studies in Medieval Literature

English 352
- Studies in Medieval Literature

Love, Lyric, and MelancholyFull course for one semester. In this course, we will study a selection of Chaucer's lyrics and early narrative poems (The Parlement of Foules, The Book of the Duchess, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde) with particular attention to the textual constructions of, and relations among, love, poetry, and melancholy. Other readings will include love lyrics from other relevant medieval writers and traditions, and medieval and contemporary texts that represent and theorize love and melancholy (e.g., Boethius, troubadour poetry, Freud, Kristeva). Middle English texts will be read in the original, other medieval texts in translation. Writing assignments will include a response journal and a research paper. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Studies in Shakespeare

English 363
- Studies in Shakespeare

Shakespeare and the Politics of the TheatreFull course for one semester. This course examines Shakespeare’s place within larger cultural controversies—both early modern and twentieth century—about the way that theatre can shape or subvert public and private identity. Though we will sample this larger discussion, the course will focus on how Shakespeare incorporates, implies, and perpetuates the controversy within his own work. Plays to be discussed include Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Shakespearean SkepticismFull course for one semester. A study of the way in which Shakespearean theater engages what Stanley Cavell calls the “catastrophe of the modern advent of skepticism.” Among the questions to be addressed are epistemological problems as they relate to tragedy, crises of belief and authority, and the gendering of skepticism. Plays to be read include King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Much Ado about Nothing, All’s Well that Ends Well, and The Winter’s Tale. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Shakespeare and the Discipline of CultureFull course for one semester. In early modern England a vigorous debate occurred about the effects of theater on character, a debate that finds its echo in modern discussions of the political and ethical effects of Shakespeare and his place in the canon. After a brief discussion of some central documents in both early modern and contemporary debates, we will examine several of Shakespeare’s plays with particular attention to the way in which they implicitly shape a political subject and a moral self. Among the plays addressed will be Richard III, Henry IV Part I, Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, Hamlet, The Tempest, and Cymbeline. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Studies in Poetry

English 366
- Studies in Poetry

Pound and H.D.: Varieties of Modernist ExperienceFull course for one semester. This course approaches modernism through an in-depth study of two of the most important modernist poets, Ezra Pound (1885-1972) and Hilda Doolittle (1886-1971). We will look at the full trajectories of their careers, the connections and disparities between them, as well as the ways they address issues common to modernism more generally. Issues we will consider are: the development of their poetry out of nineteenth-century and other traditional modes; the place of translation; their conceptions and practice of imagism; the disruptive effects of both world wars; their understanding of gender; their interest in non-poetic media, especially visual art, music, and in the case of H.D., fiction and film; the development of avant-garde linguistic techniques and forms, especially in their work on long poems (i.e., Pound’s Cantos and H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and Trilogy); and their critical reception. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, preferably including English 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

The Lyric, 1789 to the PresentFull course for one semester. A study in the theory, practice and history of the lyric from Romanticism to the present time. The lyric, as one of, if not the most characteristic poetic form, has historically been a fertile ground for both poets and critics to define and contest the constitutive elements of poetry. We will examine one of the most crucial periods in the construction of lyric, romanticism, and the critical and poetic legacy of romanticism for modernism and post-modernism through a reading of major lyric poets from all three periods. Readings and discussion will include a wide range of critical approaches to lyric, focusing on such questions as the constitution of the speaker; the relationship between the speaker and the fictional or real world he inhabits; organic form; the figure of “voice”; the role of intertextuality; the understanding of symbol and allegory within the lyric; the attack on lyric by aesthetic-ideology critics; and aesthetic form as experiment. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above, preferably including English 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Image, Body, TextFull course for one semester. This course examines poetry, painting and criticism from the Victorian and Modern periods, investigating how the notion of the image was conceptualized and, in particular, how it is connected to the representation of the body. We will investigate such issues as the relationship between vision and textuality, the nature of spectatorship and beholding, the politics of the aestheticized image, and the image as the locus for the performance of gender and sexuality. Readings may include works of Tennyson, the Brownings, D. G. Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, Pater, Ruskin, Pound, H. D., Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Frank O'Hara and Mark Doty as well as theory and criticism drawn from literature and art history. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor.

English 378
- Free Verse

Full course for one semester. This course will consider the history, practice, and theory of free verse in America from Whitman to the present. We will examine the debates about what constitutes free verse, the role it plays in defining avant-garde movements and forms, its relation to metrical poetry, and some of the most fruitful critical approaches for understanding it, including the poets’ own writings on the poetics of verse form. Among the poets we may read are Whitman, Pound, Eliot, H.D., Williams, Winters, Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Ginsberg, Zukovsky, Bishop, Rich, and Lee, as well as selections from neo-formalist and language poets. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, preferably including English 211, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

English 384
- Poetry and History

Contemporary American PoetryFull course for one semester. This course is devoted to the works of American poets writing after 1945, beginning with poets ranging from Richard Wilbur to Charles Olson and ending with those writing now. While the class will focus on specific texts, we will also consider questions about the relationships between poetry, poetics, and American culture, trying to map the broad features of various poetic traditions and practices in the United States in the last half of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the heterogeneous nature of poetic practices. Prerequisite: English 211 or consent of the instructor. Conference.

American ModernismFull course for one semester. Virginia Woolf wrote that on “or about December, 1910, human character changed,” voicing a widely shared excitement over an anticipated revolution in the arts. The American poets who stayed in the U.S. shared this excitement, but also faced unique cultural circumstances. We will do close readings of poetry by Williams, Moore, and Stevens; look at how they were responding to and helping shape American attitudes about the arts; and evaluate the poets’ ideas about poetry’s place and function. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or English 211 and an American history course, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Literary Theory

English 400
- Introduction to Literary Theory

English 393
- Literary Theory

Thinking through Literature Full course for one semester. This course will attempt a fairly systematic analysis of some central problems in literary theory. Four main topics will be addressed: signs and communication; tropes; narration; spectacle and theatricality. Among others, these philosophers, critics, and theorists will be discussed: Aristotle, Bal, Burke, Davidson, Debord, deMan, Derrida, Grice, Norris, Quintilian, and Weber. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or higher, or Literature 400, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

Theory and the Ethics of ReadingFull course for one semester. Since Aristotle, literary criticism has always had an ethical dimension, even if not always foregrounded. This course will examine several approaches to understanding the relationship between literature and ethical analysis. Among the theorists to be considered will be Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. We will test theory against some works of literature, among them Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level, or consent of the instructor. Conference.

Other Classes

English 330
- Exploration and Travel Narratives, Self and Other

A study of voyaging, exile, and homecoming in a range of narratives, from epic, drama, fiction, and travel writing. These are "liminal" texts, with figures who cross borders, and who may transgress against the familiar and fantasize a freedom otherwise denied to them. There are twin interests here: on the new land to be explored and its people, and on the consciousness of the explorer. We will engage such questions as: why does the protagonist voyage? Why does he or she write or tell stories? What shape or plot does the narrator give to the journey? What is the nature of "the exotic" and what ethnocentric assumptions and valorizations are implicit in designating an "other" defined against the normalized "self?" do such texts emphasize universalism or relativism? What is the relation of the new place to "home?" The texts may include Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Flaubert's Letters from Egypt, Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia, Greene's Journey without Maps, Canetti's Voices of Marrakech, Eco's Travels in Hyperreality, and Barthes' Empire of Signs. Prerequisites: two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference.

English 328
- Film Theory

Full course for one semester. This course develops an advanced understanding of film as a complex cultural medium through a survey of the principal theories of cinema from the silent era to the present. Some of the key theoretical approaches this course introduces include realist theory, genre criticism, auteur theory, structuralism, psychoanalytic film theory, feminist theory, and post-colonial film theory. Prerequisites: junior standing and English courses at the 200 level or above, including an introductory film course. Conference.

English 329
- Film and Fiction

Full course for one semester. This course will regard various ways directors have adopted significant novels for the screen, and will study how fictional narrative has been made into filmic narrative, as well as the different techniques for story-telling each medium employs. We will examine the value of “fidelity” as a criterion for assessment, observing the difference between “transfer” and “adoption proper.” And we will look at ways point of view is established in each medium. Some attention will be given to cinematic codes and to the complex ways literary language is rendered in visual terms. Novels and the films adopted from them will be drawn from such authors as Austen, Dickens, Kipling, Hardy, James, Conrad, Steinbeck, Moravia, Nabokov, Cortazar, and Raymond Chandler. Prerequisite: two English or literature courses. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

English 357
- Biblical Narrative: Genesis and After

Full course for one semester. This course examines biblical narratives from Genesis to Job, Ruth, and Chronicles in light of interpretive approaches from midrash to contemporary narrative poetics. Although the course will provide a survey of the Hebrew bible (Tanakh), and some consideration of its socio-historical context, the focus of the course will be literary analysis of selected texts. Readings will include a number of recent studies of the characteristics and conventions of biblical narrative modes, as well as selections from a variety of early modern and recent English translations. This course fulfills the English department requirement for a course in literature prior to 1700. Prerequisite: two courses in English or other literature, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Cross-listed as Religion 257. Not offered 2007-08.

English 386
- Literature and the Sister Arts: Theory and Practice

Full course for one semester. This course will examine the relationship between poetry and the sister arts, especially painting and music, from the later eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. While we examine particular paintings, poems, and music, our emphasis will be on the literary understanding of these other arts. The approach to this problem will be both historical and critical, including contemporary theory on representation, gender, and ekphrasis. Topics include the expanding reading, viewing, and listening audiences in the late eighteenth century; the development of literary and art criticism as genres; the ideas of the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque; and the nature of the image. Some of the figures we may read are Lessing, Burke, Wordsworth, Blake, Tennyson, Ruskin, Pater, Rossetti, Williams, H.D., Loy, Pound, O’Hara, and Doty. Prerequisite: two English classes at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

English 389
- The Scene of Imprisonment in Western Culture

Full course for one semester. From the ancient Greek religious teaching that the body is “the prison of the soul,” to Michel Foucault’s retort that “the soul is the prison of the body,” the makers of European intellectual history and literature have made imprisonment a metaphor for our existence in the world. Their views have differed radically, however, with regard to the nature and causes of human bondage, and on the question of where, or even whether, incarcerated humanity may look for deliverance. In this course we will survey representations of confinement in major classical, medieval and Renaissance texts from Plato’s Republic and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Marlowe’s Edward II, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Throughout the semester, we will particularly examine the relationship between prison as a setting for consolation against vanitas mundi (the vanity of worldly existence) and, on the other hand, as a scene of articulate complaint and occasion of political critique. Students’ final research projects may concern the continuities and discontinuities between discourses of incarceration before 1700 and more recent understandings of freedom and unfreedom. Prerequisite: two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. This course fulfills the requirement for a course in literature prior to 1700. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

English 470
- Thesis

One-half or full course for one year.

English 481
- Independent Reading

One-half or full course for one semester. Prerequisite: approval ofinstructor and division.

English 201
- Introduction to Narrative

Early Women Writers Full course for one semester. In this course we will study a generous selection of the significant corpus of writing produced by women from the early Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. By examining women’s texts in a range of genres—from saints’ lives, lyrics, romances, novels, and dramas to medical texts, mystical visions, and autobiographies—we will consider the ways in which pre-modern women construct gender identities and how they formulate their relationship with misogynist discourses. Our discussion of primary texts will be supplemented with some reading in recent theories of gender. Writers may include Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie de France, Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pisan, Margery Kempe, Anna Trapnel, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Carleton, and Aphra Behn. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Autobiography Full course for one semester. This course will introduce problems of narrative through the study of autobiography and memoir. The emphasis will be on various strategies writers have employed to describe the self, including the relation of gender to autobiography, the rhetoric of self-representation, the function and depiction of memory, problems of truth and fiction in autobiography, the nature of confession, the relation of performativity to identity, and the intersection of narrative and ideology. We will examine the ways autobiographers have given symbolic meaning and form to their experience in a variety of discourses. Autobiographical texts for study will include such works as Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sarraute’s Childhood, De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater, Kingston’s Woman Warrior, Wright’s Black Boy, Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, Leiris’s Manhood, and Kafka’s Letter to his Father. There will also be readings in autobiography theory. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Graphic NovelFull course for one semester. In this course we will consider the historical development of the genre and techniques of the Graphic Novel in America. Authors will include Lynd Ward, Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, Keiji Nakazawa, Art Spiegelman, Frank Miller, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Marjane Satrapi, Lynda Barry, Gene Luen Yang, and others. Our reading of the graphic novel will be contextualized within postmodernism and the changes in the notion of childhood, heroism, and evil in 20th and 21st century American culture. This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental elements of narrative and will include analysis of genre, panels, framing devices, layout, speech, plot, and characterization. The course will emphasize close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

Form, Style, and Meaning in CinemaFull course for one semester. This course considers the cinema as a particular media form and explores issues and methods in cinema studies. The class focuses on questions of film form and style (narrative, editing, sound, framing, mise-en-scène) and introduces students to concepts in film history and theory (industry, auteurism, spectatorship, the star system, ideology, genre). We will pay particular attention to principles of film narration and film form that are instrumental across the study of literature: plot v. story, dramatic development, temporal strategies, character development, point of view, symbolism, reality v. illusion, visual metaphor, and so forth. Students will develop a basic critical vocabulary for examining the cinema as an art form, an industry, and a system of culturally meaningful representation. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference.

English 205
- Introduction to Fiction

Portraits of LadiesFull course for one semester. This course is designed as an introduction to the basic concepts of narrative theory as exemplified in eighteenth and nineteenth century British novels by Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Henry James. We will also focus specifically on the construction of gender, and will analyze how and why ideas of femininity and masculinity change in relation to authorial sensibilities that are by turn gothic, historic, and sentimental. Prerequisites: Humanities 110 or at least sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

American GothicFull course for one semester. What was haunting America in the nineteenth century? Gothic literature stages the deepest fears and anxieties in a culture. It exposes not only with the occult and mysterious, but also crosses the line between this world and the next, the known and the unknown, the speakable and the unspeakable. This course will explore the specters haunting America through the short stories and novels of Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, and Charles Chestnutt. This course serves as an introduction to literary technique and narrative. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

The American Short StoryFull course for one semester. This course will examine the genre of the short story, especially its traditional and innovative narrative techniques, its various ways of constructing authorial point of view, its mode of plot compression and the relation of literary structure to temporality, and its range of styles from realism and naturalism to allegory, and to impressionism. Additionally, we will see how diverse American experience is represented through the form. Readings will be drawn from Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Malamud, Cheever, Carver, John Wideman, and Toni Cade Bambara, as well as a collection of Best Short Stories of 2004. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Psyche and Society in American FictionFull course for one semester. In reading novels such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, Henry James’s The American, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth in this course, we will reflect upon connections and conflicts between individual psychological demands and social values. Placing these texts within American cultural traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this course will address questions of religious conviction and spirituality, self-reliance, manners, new conceptions of the American community, and modern urbanization. We will consider the unique features of different genres and descriptive techniques, including romance, melodrama, realism, and the modern psychological novel. Other writers may include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Dreiser, and Nathanael West. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2007-08.

The Post-War and Contemporary NovelFull course for one semester. This course will introduce students to major North American novelists and their work from the immediate post-World War II years to the very recent past (from the late 1940s to the 1990s). As we discuss the assigned readings we will consider questions surrounding representations of race and gender, mass culture and consumerism, the Cold War and the nuclear age, civil rights, feminism, technocracy, the counter-culture, American regionalisms, suburbia, linguistic experimentation, genre, postmodernism, globalization, and the conditions of urban experience. Novelists may include Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Philip Roth, Ishmael Reed, Cormac McCarthy, and Jonathan Franzen. We will also read selected critical and theoretical texts that define the issues that structure the course and watch selected films—such as The Manchurian Candidate (1962)—that provide cultural contexts. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

The Basics of the NovelFull course for one semester. This course serves as an introduction to the history of both the idea and the form of the English novel, beginning in the early eighteenth century and continuing through to roughly the present day. We will look at brief critical writings by major narrative scholars in conjunction with examples of the novel’s various sub-genres, including the gothic, the marriage plot, the historical novel, the Bildungsroman, the detective story, the modernist novel, and the postmodern novel. Major works to be studied may include novels by Daniel Defoe, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, and J. M. Coetzee. There will be numerous short writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2007-08.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Bildungsroman and the Courtship NovelFull course for one semester. This course examines the two dominant forms of the nineteenth-century novel, the Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, and the courtship novel. In examining these two forms we will discuss the nature and history of literary genres; narrators and narrative structure; the function of novelistic character; and the concept of realism. We will read a number of critical texts by major scholars of narrative to illuminate these discussions, along with major works by the following novelists: Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference.

Genres of the Early Novel Full course for one semester. This course will look at the range of genres explored by novelists in the period of the British novel in its rise from marginal status to dominance in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. We will focus on the range of formal and expressive possibilities the novel develops in this period, shaped by the various forms it takes (realist, gothic, historical, sentimental, and so on), and pursue the question of how genre conventions and individual works interact. Major authors will include Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen, and Walter Scott. Relevant short critical readings on genre, realism, and the novel will be drawn from Auerbach, Bakhtin, Frye, Shklovsky, Todorov, Watt, and others. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

Empire and the NovelFull course for one semester. This course will examine the relationship between Imperialism and the novel, primarily between British Imperialism and the modern twentieth-century novel. The course will also introduce students to postcolonial theory and criticism. Reading major novels of authors such as Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Rudyard Kipling, Doris Lessing, E. M. Forster, Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, and J. M. Coetzee, we will reflect at length upon nationalism, the causes and consequences of the expansion and contraction of the British empire, anti-colonial liberation movements, the cultural contexts of literary modernism, and the ongoing debate over globalization. We will read influential writings by theorists and critics such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, and Fredric Jameson. We will also screen films such as The Battle of Algiers, Blade Runner, and Caché. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

British Women Novelists since 1900Full course for one semester. In this course, using Virginia Woolf's classic feminist literary polemic A Room of One's Own as our point of departure, we will read works by women novelists from the United Kingdom over the span of roughly the last hundred years. We will pay particular attention to the novel's subgenres (such as the realist novel, the romance, the Gothic, the Bildungsroman, the modernist novel, the postmodern novel, and the postcolonial novel) and how these forms are shaped and affected by gender. Novelists to be studied might include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Iris Murdoch, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, A.S. Byatt, and Andrea Levy. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference.

American Success and FailureFull course for one semester. An abiding concern of American literature is an obsession with individual success, particularly the conundrum of attaining material success at the expense of other values. Taking classic essays by Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson as our points of departure, we will examine how 19th and 20th century American writers such as Horatio Alger, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and Nella Larsen have explored that obsession through the form of the novel. We will pay particular attention to the development of literary styles such as regionalism, realism, and naturalism as responses to changes in American culture that likewise shape different novelistic subgenres, such as romance, the realist novel, melodrama, the modernist novel, and the psychological novel. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

English 213
- Introduction to Poetry

American Poetry Full course for one semester. In this class we will consider the historical development of selected forms and techniques in the American poetic tradition. Poets will include Anne Bradstreet, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde, Sylvia Plath, Li-Young Lee, Essex Hemphill, and Luci Tapahonso. In addition we will read selections from Aztec Sorrow Songs, Corridos, and the Blues. This course is designed to introduce students to the fundamental elements of a poem, such as rhythm, diction, imagery, metaphor, tone, form, speaker, and audience. The course will emphasize close reading of the texts, and there will be frequent writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2007–08.

Twentieth-Century Poetry by WomenFull course for one semester. Reading a wide range of innovative twentieth-century women poets, we will explore how questions of poetic form intersect, illumine, and problematize questions of gender, race, class, and national identity. Beginning with the expatriate community in Paris during the teens and reading up through to work by women poets writing presently, we will ask how poetry specifically offers a forum for re-thinking being in the world and challenging power structures. Our readings of poetry will be complemented by philosophy and theory by women. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.

English 242
- Introduction to Drama

Modern European IVFull course for one semester. This course continues from Modern European III, which covers works up to 1940. Here we will look at playwrights whose first major work appeared between 1942 and 1952. Major themes will be existentialism and the absurd. Likely authors will include Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Max Frisch, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Modern European VFull course for one semester. This course takes up where European IV ended, the aftermath of World War II. We will look primarily at the work of writers whose first major plays appeared between 1954 and 1957. This semester’s concentration will be on England and the movement known as “the angry young men.” Writers will include Brendan Behan, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, John Osborne, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Modern European VIFull course for one semester. This course continues from Modern European V, which covered playwrights whose first major work appeared between 1954 and 1957. Here, we will look at the work of playwrights whose first major appeared in the late 1950s; and as always, we will look at the work in its social and political contexts. Probable authors will include Ann Jellicoe, Shelagh Delaney, John Arden, and Fernando Arrabal. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Modern European VIIPrevious incarnations of this course have looked primarily at the realist tradition in European drama from the 1830s to the 1960s. This semester we will pause in the chronology and go back to look at the non realist tradition from the 1890s to the 1960s. Likely authors will include Maeterlinck, Briusov, Kandinsky, Marinetti, Tzara, Witkiewicz, Capek, Ghelderode, Anouilh, and Arrabal. Conference.

Shakespeare’s TragediesFull course for one semester. A study of five Shakespearean tragedies, among them Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. The focus will be on language, dramatic structure, character, and the conventions of the genre, as well as the role of women, the supernatural, the politics of rule, the self-conscious employment of theatricality, and such cultural issues as attitudes towards race. We will also read some theories of tragedy. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Shakespeare, Text and PerformanceFull course for one semester. This course will consider the relationship between literary analysis and theatrical or cinematic performance in several Shakespearean plays. We will pay particular attention to images of plays and playing in the scripts, to the different political and ethical implications of different performances, and to changes in conventions of representation. In addition to the normal responsibilities of any course, students will be expected to view films and to work up one or two staged readings of a scene. Plays to be examined include King Lear, Othello, The Tempest, Henry V, and Much Ado about Nothing. Lecture and conference.

Shakespeare's ComediesFull course for one semester. A study of several "romantic" comedies (Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, Twelfth Night), several "problem comedies" (The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure), and a "romance" (The Winter's Tale). The course will focus on such issues in the Shakespeare canon as cross-dressing and the problematic representation of woman's power, madness and irrationality as comic tropes, the court vs. what has been termed "the green world," and the complex interplay between Elizabethan comic conventions and the psychology of dramatic character. In addition we'll read one or two comedies by Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson (Volpone, The Alchemist) to see how Jonson treats comedy in an altogether different manner. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

Gender and Genre in Shakespeare's PlaysFull course for one semester. In this semester-long survey of Shakespeare's plays, we will focus upon the intersection of gender and genre, both on the Renaissance stage and in more recent adaptations and productions. How does the genre of a given play (tragedy, comedy, romance) affect the audience's expectations of gender roles? Does genre constrain the dramatic representations of femininity, of masculinity, of breaking or bending traditional gender boundaries? Conversely, we will also think about the ways in which Shakespeare potentially uses gender to challenge the audience's notions of what comedies and tragedies can do, and how gender and genre can collide to resist received notions concerning class, authority, identity, familial relations, and ethnic and racial difference. Plays under consideration may include The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference.

English 301
- Junior Seminar in English Literary History

The Fallen World: The Anglo-American Literary TraditionFull course for one semester. This course, a study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English literary history, will focus on the fictional treatment of the postlapsarian condition following the example of John Milton's Paradise Lost. There will be substantial reading in literary theory. We will consider questions about genre, tradition and innovation, canon formation, authority, and influence. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Not offered 2007-08.

Theories of the NovelFull course for one semester. A study of the methods and a sampling of the materials of literary history focusing on major theories of the novel over the last century. Critical readings will be drawn from Lukács, Bakhtin, Shklovsky, Frye, Watt, Jameson, and Moretti. These will be read alongside novels by Fielding, Austen, Balzac, and Dickens, as well as some shorter works, as a means of examining the effectiveness of particular critical claims about what the modern novel is and does. We will also discuss modes of narration and literary structure, stylistic change and formal innovation in the novel, and the nature of the relationship between ideology and the aesthetic. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

Lyric, Epic, KünstlerromanFull course for one semester. A study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English literary history. After some definitional questions, the course will begin with an examination of change and continuity in the English sonnet. We will then focus especially upon Wordsworth’s Prelude, considered both as a transformation of the epic tradition and as the main poetic exemplar of what would become the novel of artistic self-discovery and development. Texts to be read include: Spenser, The Fairie Queene (Book I); Milton, Paradise Lost; Thomson, The Seasons; Wordsworth, The Prelude; Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Woolf, To the Lighthouse. Throughout the semester, we will address problems of canon construction, literary intertextuality, generic transformation, and critical history. Students will develop their own critical history of approaches to a work by a major author. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing, two English courses at the 200 level or above, or consent of the instructor. Conference. Not offered 2007-08.

The Composition of a NovelFull course for one semester. This course will explore the critical methods and a sampling of texts in English literary history by analyzing the composition of Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1849) in a variety of ways. These will include: 1) close readings of the dialog between this still non-canonical novel with its canonical precursors in drama and epic (e.g. Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Milton's Paradise Lost); 2) questions about the role of Brontë's biography, the influence of her contemporary reviewers, and her recourse to newspaper accounts of the Luddite rebellions and the Napoleonic Wars; 3) Brontë's relations to the intellectual history of her day, especially on matters of national identity, labor economy, and sexual equality (Wollstonecraft, Marx, Engels). We will consider questions of genre, tradition and innovation, canon formation, critical history and gender. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference.

America After the FallFull course for one semester. This course, a study of the methods and a sample of the materials of American literary history, will focus on epic and lyric poetry. Texts will include Milton's Paradise Lost and the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. In addition, there will be substantial reading in literary theory and an extensive critical bibliography project. We will consider questions about genre, literary authority, tradition and innovation, canon formation, and intertextuality. Primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference.

English 302
- Junior Seminar in English Literary History

Epic and Novel Full course for one semester. This course offers a study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English literary history focusing on epic and novel, with texts that may include Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Milton’s Paradise Lost, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and a novel by Toni Morrison. In addition, there will be substantial reading in literary theory. We will consider questions about genre, literary authority, tradition and innovation, canon formation, intertextuality, and the role of gender in epic and novel. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference.

Paradise After Milton—The Anglo-American TraditionFull course for one semester. A study of the methods and a sample of the materials of English literary history using the Anglo-American epic tradition from Milton onwards. Texts include Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. D.’s Trilogy, and Morrison’s Paradise. In addition, there will be substantial reading in literary theory and an extensive critical bibliography project. We will consider questions of genre, influence, authority, tradition and innovation, canon formation, and modernity. This course is primarily for English majors, for whom the junior seminar is usually required no later than the end of the junior year. Prerequisites: junior standing and two English courses at the 200 level or above. Conference. Not offered 2007–08.